Symphogear Manga Volume 1 - in English!

I promised, and now I'm going to deliver! I'm proud to say my Symphogear manga scanlation project is 100% complete. It took me a large number of hours to go from a fresh volume to scanning, editing and finally, translating the text. It's not perfect, but I'd like to think that the quality will show through anyway. Download after the jump.

Download here: http://www.mediafire.com/?5jqtitvqulfqa5x

Mirrors:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/q3su9l
http://www.filefactory.com/file/fotsp41ca5x/n/Symphogear_Volume_1.rar

Please, please, please, support the official release if you can. The volume costs about $8 and is well worth your money. As nice as scans may be they pale in comparison to holding the actual thing in your hand. It's a quality release and if you like the art you won't regret it - especially the color pages! 

You can buy it from: CDJapan | Amazon Japan | Kinokuniya

Now as far as my release goes, I mentioned that I'm not a professional. This is my first time scanning a manga and although I looked up the proper techniques I can't guarantee that it's flawless. I worked with photoshop and did my best to make the pages look good and keep them at a high resolution. As a result the file size is a little big, but hopefully not too big. The other problem is in regards to cleaning - I don't have a tablet and my hand isn't steady enough to spend hours cleaning up every little text overlay. I did what I call "half-cleaning" - if I could clean it and make it look reasonably good, then I did. If it was too complicated I slapped a white box over it and called it good. I don't think the art suffers from this - there are no instances where you are missing out on important details. 

As far as the translation goes - I'm confident in its accuracy, there shouldn't be any mistakes or contextual issues. I worked hard to make it sound good and keep the character's personalities consistent. There are numerous pages of notes in the back regarding certain translation choices and general notes about some of the terms that the author used. I did not translate sound effects, those are a big pain and I don't think it's worth the effort to add a few "woosh"s and "bam"s - you can more or less figure out what each of them is just by looking at the art. Thankfully the SFX in this manga are not abundant so hopefully it won't be too noticeable! 

Finally the last thing I'll say is that please share this! Upload it to manga reading sites, post it on your social media and forums, whatever. I'll be posting myself in a few places (probably MAL and 4chan), but I can only spread it so far. I translated this so that people could read it, but they need to know it exists first! So don't hesitate and don't bother asking me for any sort of permission - you're free to do what you will with it. 

Well that's about all I have to say, please enjoy and please send me any sort of feedback. I'm happy to take both praise and criticism in an effort to better my work. As for the future - I don't think Newtype Ace has been publishing any new chapters lately (they cycle through different series each month), so I have no idea when (or if) we can expect a volume 2. But I'll be posting any updates of that nature here, so keep reading.